That’s a pretty big call and more than a polite nod about where things might be headed. *

If you’ve watched a video on social media, you know they can be powerful.

And while there’s some awful ones out there, chances are you’ve liked or shared a video at one time or another.

For some brands, video’s an integral part of their marketing strategy, and if it’s not part of yours, it’s one that’s worth keeping an eye on.

“The single most important strategy in content marketing today is video.” – Gary Vaynerchuk.

Video can help build brand awareness and get (or increase) engagement with your fans, followers and beyond.

You can reach people where they already are.

You can also get a little more human, show behind the scenes, share client stories, and provide information, education and even a bit of entertainment.

What’s not to love?

To get started using video on your favourite social media platform, there are a few general “rules” ** to follow:

Keep it short: Most people don’t want to watch a documentary on social (unless, perhaps, they’re on YouTube).
People are busy.
They’re scrolling.
Holding attention is hard.
Keep it short and snappy.

Single message: Don’t try to say too much in a single video.

When you’re keeping it brief, it’s better to communicate one thing effectively, than a few things poorly.

Have goals: Before you post anything, ask yourself “why”.

Having an overarching strategy and editorial mission will help you filter out what’s noise and what’s not.

Understand the context: Different social platforms attract users with different needs and goals.

Facebook might be for family, LinkedIn for business colleagues, and Snapchat for friends.

So keep the videos relevant to the platform and the mindset of the users that are already there.

That means, it’s probably best to avoid posting those funny cat videos on LinkedIn.

Make it shareable: Social media is driven by the interactions it facilitates.

If you can’t imagine your video being shared or commented on, think about what you need to do to tweak and improve it.

Unique, interesting and useful are three good basic criteria to get you critiquing your work before you hit publish.

Get emotional: A study in Psychological Science found that people are more likely to share content that evokes high arousal emotions, like positive messages, anger and anxiety.

So think about what you can do to elicit strong emotion in your video posts.

Each social platform has its own audience, features and tactics that are likely to get results. Here’s a quick look at the video elements of the most popular social channels financial advisers tend to use.

What that means, is that including captions in your video may help increase your engagement.

Twitter

Twitter is relatively new to the video game, and allows you to host only short videos. While it is also super easy to link to a video hosted on a platform like YouTube, Vimeo or Wistia, there’s no doubt the auto-play of a natively uploaded video gets more views.

Twitter is pretty noisy. There’s a lot going on. It’s high speed.

So nuggety little video chunks, less than 30 secs, are a good place to start.

Keep them light and friendly. And use humour and personality to help make and strengthen connections.

Think about how well gifs (mini animations without sound) are received on Twitter, and you’ll get an idea of the type of video that might work.